Galleria Pamphilj Doria

At length, minus a hat, and with the assistance of a high school Latin and Greek teacher with whom Vicki had a pleasant, helpful, and informative conversation, we arrived at the Galleria Pamphilj Doria. The GPD is somewhat like a Great House in the UK of GB: many impressive and beautifully-appointed state rooms. Only it's in Rome and on the outside looks like another huge cruddy old building with faded plaster falling off. On the inside, however, it's a palace. That's the Italian way. Anyhow, the Pamphilj-Doria family got its big break when its patriarch became Pope Innocent X. All along they had been collecting art, and the palazzo here contains some 700 works, about 300, I think, on display. For comparison, the National Gallery in London contains somewhat over 2,000 works. So this is a major private collection, very probably the largest private collection we have seen. To be sure, much of it exemplifies the perils of private collecting, particularly in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries: much is by artists who didn't quite pan out as hoped, many works by the biggies turned out actually to be "in the manner of" or "by a follower of" or "by the studio of" the biggie. Nevertheless, there are some major masterpieces here. The lot of it is presented in 17th century gallery style, that is, paintings stacked from wainscot to ceiling, in a bit of a jumble, historically, but historically correct for the period. It's an art-lovers paradise.

Courtyard

Actually, we liked the ground floor bath best of all

After the several state rooms and one of the better audio-
guides we have heard (done by the current Prince himself),
you get to the several corridors of art...

The ceilings of all of which are done is this interesting faux-
Roman style

A beautiful little Durer...apparently under-appreciated here

A Filippo Lippi Annunciation

Raphael's Double Portrait

An early Caravaggio--Rest on the Flight to Egypt--not the
"painter of light" yet, but you can still tell it's a Caravaggio
since the composition is organized around someone's
buttocks

Peter Breughel Elder's Naples, smallish, but a real treasure

And the greatest of the gems, Velasquez' Portrait
of Innocent X--Innocent is said to have rejected
the portrait as "too real"

And, in the same room of treasure, Bernini's
bust of Innocent X

Impressive place; glad we finally saw it